AMD Enters 90 NM zone

Advanced Micro Devices says it has reached a chip manufacturing milestone that will lead to improvements across its range of processor offerings for PCs and servers.

The chipmaker confirmed on Tuesday that, as previously reported, it has begun manufacturing chips using its new 90-nanometer process, meeting a deadline set after earlier delays. At the same time, it revealed that the first of those processors to appear in a PC will be members of a family of low-power mobile Athlon 64 chips, due to show up in notebooks in "coming months," a company representative said.

Generally, shifting manufacturing processes--in this case moving from a 130-nanometer process to one that turns out chips whose average internal feature size is 90-nanometers--enables chipmakers to boost performance by packing more transistors into each chip. The shift can also cut costs and power consumption, depending on the design and other circumstances.